Digesting the meaning of food

Mia Stainsby, Postmedia News12.01.2011

In France, the Catholics equated eras of economic plenty with pleasure. It was 19th-century French lawyer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who said eating was a civilizing act that tamed urges into tastes, where impulses submitted to manners.

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North America, it seems to me, is missing the food-love gene.

Oh sure, the blogosphere crackles with foodies. Streets rumble under the hoof beats of diners speeding to restaurant openings. The Food Network is a phenomenal success

But do we really love food in the embedded-in-the-soul way Europeans and Asians, for instance, do? I wondered about that when I was in France and Spain recently.

In Languedoc, we were invited to a "simple lunch" by friends of friends who were in the middle of the grape harvest (vend-age), a crazy time of year for winemakers. We sat down to four courses, all cooked from scratch. My husband yielded to a second helping of quiche (with wild mushrooms picked by the couple in the Pyrenees), thinking that would conclude the lunch. But no, it was followed by a fish stew (bourride with rouille and toasted baguette), salad, a cheese course, and a blueberry crumble with locally grown blueberries — the tastiest I’ve ever had

That was after appetizers and many kinds of drink. The slim hostess cooks lunch every day for her family, for whom coming together over a meal is an entrenched part of life

In Spain, I encountered daily exasperation as shops and services locked up tight for two hours at midday. We’d trekked across Barcelona for a ham tasting around lunchtime. Sorry! Closed for two hours! Everyone goes home for lunch (and a nap) or to a restaurant. The restaurants alone are thrumming

Who better to ask about what food means to different cultures than the eloquent Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker magazine writer whom Canadians can claim as our own, even though he’s lived in Paris and then New York for years. His book The Table Comes First (Knopf Canada) was just published, and in it, he looks at the meaning of food. (His CBC Massey lectures, Winter, were also recently published as a book.)

"There’s not a single human group that doesn’t have a ritualized approach to eating," Gopnik said recently on the phone from Toronto, where he was on a book tour. "It’s brilliant. It’s the need that we’ve turned into desire. It’s a need to survive, like breathing, yet funnily, people tend not to have highly ritualized ways of breathing. It’s the one physical need of every human being and it has turned into an elaborate desire. That’s the case with sex, too, but all of us, three times a day, have food.

He agrees that North Americans, including, of course, Canadians, tend to be puritanical and moralistic about food and pleasures. "One of the things I wanted to say in the book is, we don’t have to prove at every moment that what we’re eating is virtuous. We feel guilty about our pleasures. It was a long time before we could write and talk about food like we do about art and poetry.

He says what gives us pleasure in food isn’t just a tingling sensation but a "total frame of mind." The well-travelled Gopnik says the place he finds the most food pleasure is with the Gopnik family. "It’s a cosmopolitan Jewish-Canadian-Parisian way of eating that I grew up with and still respond to. I still love and cook French for special occasions, and Italian through the rest of the week because it’s easy and delicious." The total frame of mind, in other words, includes the social and the emotional.

Gwen Chapman, a professor in the University of B.C. faculty of land and food systems, supports this view. "It totally rings true to me," she says. "A U.S. psychologist did surveys comparing people’s relationships to food in North America to France, Belgium and Japan. North Americans tended to have a ’worry’ orientation to food. It was seen as risky, to be avoided and controlled. Health, weight control have become bound up in each other.

"Now obesity and body image have become part of being healthy, so food is something to be guilty about, something to resist. The survey shows people in France, in particular, have a totally different orientation. Food is a source of pleasure; it’s positive; it’s something to enjoy.

She says it could have something to do with economics and the abundance of cheap food

"In the economic development of North America, food quickly became a cash commodity, and we didn’t have that close relationship with it. Crops were grown in huge amounts."

In Vancouver, the immense Chinese community, I hope, is leading us to that place of food love. Food means pleasure and family, and they eat as a group — no one leaves the kids behind with babysitters. And they put their money where their mouth is, literally — restaurants are high on their hierarchy of needs and wants and expenditures.

I’ve heard from a plugged-in food blogger that about 70 per cent of local food blogs are Chinese-Canadians in a food huddle. To get a sense of food’s importance in that culture, all you need to know is the Chinese greeting upon a social encounter: "Have you eaten?"

Sometimes, it’s difficult to distinguish food love from status love. I remember dining at Lumiere once, when chef Rob Feenie was putting out gorgeous meals. No one was noticing the food. The importance was in being at the right restaurant, not in enjoying the food.

Gopnik says taste was the most difficult thing to articulate when writing his book. "I struggled and I essentially held my breath and put it in. The opposition we make between fashion and fad and enduring taste is a false one. We’re always engaged in fashion, like eating locally, seasonally. Those aren’t just fads. They reflect changes in values. We’re reflecting what we value.

You can take, for example, an all-offal dinner I had recently, a six-course meal involving heart, intestines, stomach, brain, snout, face and blood. At one time, the nasty bits represented peasant food. Now they’re associated with food security, environmental impacts of protein farming, and valuing all parts of the sacrificed animal. Soon offal will be adopted into our taste repertoire as eagerly as sashimi.

"Faith, famine and fear," Gopnik says, are the greatest enforcers of taste. We, in Canada, developed the tastes of abundance, but now we are moving toward environmental and perhaps compassionate values in the foods we like.

In France, the Catholics equated eras of economic plenty with pleasure. It was 19th-century French lawyer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (after whom one of my favourite cheeses was named) who said eating was a civilizing act that tamed urges into tastes, where impulses submitted to manners.

But food, like the society it reflects, evolves. The French, once the grandmasters of culinary arts, are now struggling with their food identity. Once the gold standard, the Michelin stars are being questioned — no, assaulted — by a new generation embodied in Le Fooding, a reform movement attempting to knock the stuffing out of the snobbery of French food. It’s a museum cuisine, followers of Le Fooding say, which has been enforced by tourism.

If fossilization is France’s problem, ours seems to be speed. We speed through mealtimes, which hardly exist in some families. We speed through life. Food is fuel, much like gasoline. Immigrants introduce new dishes, new ingredients, new cooking techniques, but such largesse has made us a fickle lot, applauding, then moving on to the next new thing. There’s something to be said for adopting a dish, an idea, an ingredient, and honing and refining that thing, which is what French cuisine did during its pinnacle years.

Yes, there’s the Slow Food Movement telling us to appreciate, to cook with love and patience, to respect our abundance — but there’s a screeching dissonance between that and the warp speed of our lives. Which reminds me. I’ve got to run. I’ve got another story to write before rushing home to grab a bite and then meeting friends for a movie — about food.

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